Always a rule changer, Mike Jankowske has crafted a career that has enabled him to work pretty consistently using his unique skills. Working in a highly regulated industry, Mike constantly searched for creative and innovative approaches to helping clients plan for their life goals. This also helped him to grow into his mission in his latest stage of life, partial retirement. Listen for Mike's knowledge and use it in planning for yourself. Learn about the Luckiest People in the World at www.theluckiestpeopleintheworld.com
TRANSCRIPT:
Diane Dayton 0:02
This is Changing the Rules, a podcast about designing the life you want to live, hosted by KC Dempster and Ray Loewe, the luckiest guy in the world.
KC Dempster 0:12
Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Changing the Rules. I'm KC Dempster. And I'm here with Ray Loewe in the Wildfire Podcasting studios. And we have a great show ahead. I think we've made our guest a little bit nervous, but that's good. It'll keep him on his toes.
Ray Loewe 0:29
Yeah. And you forgot wonderful.
KC Dempster 0:31
Well, I thought I would let you do that.
Ray Loewe 0:33
Okay, so we're here in Wildfire Podcast studios, which I understand we've added video component today, which we may not go live with, but somewhere we're live. And, again, one quick kind of a commercial for Wildfire because they've been so good to us. When we started in this business over a year ago, we had no concept of how to do a podcast. We still don't know how to do a podcast, but we found out we don't need to know because the folks at Wildfire do it all for us. Right. So we have an engineer Taylor, who isolated himself in another room, so he doesn't have to put up with us. And and he monitors all this and puts it together. And at the end of this, hopefully we come out with something that's worthwhile and entertaining and at least amusing for everybody.
KC Dempster 1:22
Okay, let's get to the show.
Ray Loewe 1:24
Okay. So we have our guest. Okay, and you know, we're going back in time again. So so I used to be a partner in a broker dealer. This was part of my securities, entree, whatever it was, the way we did business and in dealing with being a financial advisor, and I met this guy by the name of Mike Jankowske, who misspelled his name on purpose, just so that the rest of us have difficulty in our life,
KC Dempster 1:59
says the man with LOEWE. Yeah,
Ray Loewe 2:03
and I I kind of we parted company from our broker dealers. And and and Mike, in effect, felt constrained by the rules, I think, yes, that's what it was. And he formed his own business and formed a very, very successful firm. And since that time, he's actually retired and sold off a good part of his interest in that firm. And so he is kind of retired. But as we're gonna see, Mike will never be retired. So Mike Jankowske with an E. Say, hello to everybody.
Mike Jankowske 2:41
Hello, everybody. And by the way, you know, I would imagine, right and during his entire life would probably be correcting people know, there's an E at the end of my name, there's an E at the end of the name. And I would I have the same problem. No, there's an E at the end of my name, there's an E and the end of My name
Ray Loewe 2:58
Well, it makes us distinctive.
KC Dempster 3:00
That's true. Well, and I don't have an unusual spelling for my name, but most people don't understand Dempster they often consider they hear Dempster. But what they write down is Dempsey.
Ray Loewe 3:12
So anyway, a quick aside here, because it's relevant. Okay. One of our favorite places to hang out with a place called Fleming's restaurant, and one of the managers there's name was Loew, without the e. right, so we chipped in and bought him an E for Christmas, so that he can be complete. Now, I can't do that with you. Like, you know, I, you know, you have the it's just, it's different. So anyway, let's capitalize on the fact that you're going to be different. All right. So So tell us a little bit to start out about your journey. What are what are some of the things that you did in your life and and you formed your own business, because this is what the luckiest people in the world are all about. They're people who personally design their own lives, and then step in and live them the way they want to live them. So give us give us some background?
Mike Jankowske 4:11
Well, interestingly enough, I was a financial advisor working with a major company. And I had been a manager there and had a bunch of people I had trained, mentored as part of the planning process. And what made me kind of unique in that is the fact that I was always trying to find innovative ways to proactive ways of how to solve people's financial life's experiences. And, you know, and conflicts, and some of my same people that I mentored made the decision that it was too restrictive, to do with a lot of the things that we could offer clients, not just from a product perspective, but more importantly advice. And so we I was kind of pulled initially kicking and screaming away from the company to start our own firm back in 1996. We haven't looked back since we become very, very innovative in how we approach planning and help people. And it's a it's a playground for me based on how I'm wired. And, and that's the blessing that I feel I've had over the years because I was able to refine what I'm best suited to serve clients during my career, and actually, I can, I can safely say that helping and working with clients to deal with their life goals and their and the issues they have to contend with, it was sort of like the training ground for a call to be able to create or incubator to be able to create my mission in partial retirement Ray remember, partial retirement, Ray not retired partial retirement. So it, it's kind of cool that you'd have a career that would set the table for you to be able to take what you're best suited to do, and how you're wired. And to be able to bridge that into a purpose that is to what you would want to be doing when most people today, when they use the R word in retirement, don't know what they're going to do for the rest of their lives. They they're searching like a college student graduating from college, what their purpose and mission is moving forward. So it's kind of cool that my own clients taught me and set the stage for me to, to innovate and grow around that, and grow into the my mission and purpose in the next stage of life.
Ray Loewe 6:34
You know why most people have this problem and, and a lot of it becomes comes from the traditions of retirement. You know, when you look at your parents, your parents retired at age 65, maybe they had a pension of some kind, maybe they didn't, they live for 10 years, maybe in most cases, and they didn't have an awful lot of time. But now the norm is to live a lot longer. And we're meeting tons of people that are 100 and 90 and 105. And you see these people in the news every day. So what do you do with the rest of your life, when it comes time to do this, this retirement is a waste of time. So we're on the same page there. And one of the goals of the luckiest people in the world. And this is another reason why I know you're one of us over here is that they have a purpose and a mission. So So talk to us a little bit about this client experience of people have them teaching you that you had you had to you couldn't retire. How's that?
Mike Jankowske 7:38
Well, it's kind of interesting, because, you know, part of what happened with the evolution of my career was, this may sound funny, but as I reached about 10 years before I actually sold out part of my interest in the firm, I wasn't working with clients directly anymore, I wasn't dealing with the every day, you know, client servicing whatever the case may be, I was more focused on the things I had the most passion for and was instinctively best at being able to do and that is to work with their income tax and estate planning and charitable planning, you know, goals. And so the bottom line is I was having fun in a space and developing all kinds of ideas. But more importantly, when I talk about learning for my clients, it's also the gratification and understanding that you know, the average client getting ready to retire anybody that has a life challenge or life goal. It's the same thing. And I think what's what makes me excited about my next stage of life and what happened during the pre prior stage of my life, okay, is the idea that the satisfaction of seeing a client, or a person where you see the light bulb go off in their head, because instead of advising clients or advising people on things, you collaborate, you help them flip the switch from reactive thinking, to proactive thinking, I can't even tell there's so many stories I can tell about how clients working with us very deeply in their financial planning, came up with unique solutions we didn't even think of because we allowed them and help them flip that switch to brainstorm and to collaborate on what they wanted to accomplish in life. And I think that, that taught me a lot and gave me a lot of satisfaction. But it also framed my thinking about how could I leverage what happened during my official career, going into the next stage of life? How could I take the way that I can help somebody flip a reactive part of their brain over to a proactive to solve a problem or to address what they're going to be doing? And to me that became more of a framing like I said, have a mission and purpose For going into partial retirement, and my my narrow focus is, of course, charitable planning, which I'm very passionate about. But that is that the experiences over and over again, of what I had, I'll give you one little quick story. And I always find this amusing because I had a math teacher who just couldn't retire. She and her husband would sit with me a few times in a row. And she would she would go into math, analysis paralysis, she would say, Oh, I need to see a scenario. Where am I going to be okay? If I retired nine months, in six months, in two years, and whatever, and you could see the husband building up frustration, and I finally said, Okay, that's it. I'm going to give you a homework assignment. That was very gratifying to give a math teacher a homework assignment. And I said, I'm going to give it two weeks, I want you to take some time away from grading papers and doing stuff and just start researching what it is that you'd be doing in retirement. And she goes, Well, alright, well, whatever. And the husband's ready to fall off the seat laughing 24 hours later, I get a phone call. It's her. I'm ready to retire right now. End of the school term. I'm going, Wow, what happened? Well, you know what? I did what you said I did my homework assignment Bingo. She says, You won't believe what I what I found out I could be doing now. Here's the part. That's cool. You know, this is not at all unusual one, you know, this already ran and KC, she started researching what she could do as a retired teacher to mentor math teachers. And so it's like, well, if I don't have to do all the, all the all the extra work and all the craziness as being a teacher, I great, I would be excited about mentoring math teachers, to help them through developing their careers. That's happened time, and time and time again, that's happened over and over again. And then my brain's in learning from those experiences. I started saying, you know, what? charitable planning? What can I do to leverage the impact because I've done a lot of charitable gift arrangements over the years of all different sizes have consulted with non for profits, and how they can create plan giving programs. And and I've learned a lot from that in my brain is formulated. And that's perhaps for another discussion. But the bottom line is, there is something concrete that's evolved out of that, because of those experiences. Because it I've been taught to innovate. And my my Kolbe assessment, which Casey can tell you all about is much theorist, which means I can't help myself, it's like being a brainstormer or on steroids. You just cannot stop from looking at scenarios and start saying to yourself, Well, what if, but I do it verbally in front of other people, my wife shrugs every time we go anywhere, because sometimes I'll see what's going on in the business plan with an establishment. And I strike up a friendly conversation. And all of a sudden, we're brainstorming all kinds of exciting ideas, that that can be done to help improve their business. And so I've learned to kind of like tamp tempered tamp that down, so to speak,
Ray Loewe 13:13
but I don't think so. Okay, and you're sure right, and you should get by the way.
Mike Jankowske 13:19
But that's the cool part. And now because of the pandemic, and I keep looking at how we're divided. And I say to myself, there's a lot of reactive thinking going on right now. People are not, it's hard right now emotionally to flip that switch, to take all that negative energy and convert it to something that could create positive impact for what you could do either personally or for others. And that has really amplified for me that my mission and purpose going into partial retirement to help charities, great planned giving programs, is critically important. Hmm. So I think the big that, again, the life experiences, I can spend hours telling you stories about how I learned what frame for myself, but it's because I was willing to change willing to adapt to what was going on, as I was experienced in it. I've had advisors tell me that, you know, we just we can't be that varied in how we give advice. We need to curb it a little bit and be able to robotize it so to speak, to create systems in place to support it. And my response is, well, that's crazy. Why kill innovation, especially if the clients are helping you. And, and the other part I've always told people is if anybody ever if I ever say to anybody, and I've heard this from people in all walks of life besides financial planners, if I ever say to somebody, I've been through that I know all that there's nothing new that I need to learn. I've always said clients and advisors run like, you know what? away from me? Yeah. And I think that's the attitude for people like ourselves, in effect that, you know, it's almost like a challenge. If somebody says that to you, because you're in it, because there's always a way to innovate around even the same idea that somebody might have tried once or twice and it didn't work.
KC Dempster 15:24
Right. Right. Well, and that is very much a part of your Kolbe. I'm not, I'm usually forbidden to talk about it. But I can, I can see, I can just see it. It's it's like it's up on a on a blackboard.
Ray Loewe 15:35
Okay. Okay. So we know, from this Kolbe stuff, and that you're hardwired in this direction. I mean, yeah, you're right, you can't help yourself. But one of the things that I think some of our listeners need to know is, how did you get the space in here to allow yourself to go the direction that you want, you know, most people are tied in to making a living, yet, you seem to have found a way to give yourself the permission to move the way you want to move? Can you give us some light on that?
Mike Jankowske 16:10
Yeah, and here's the part where I had it easier than most people had it, because the natural evolution of my role on the firm, screamed it. And so everybody supported it. But I would say that I've had worked with clients and other folks I've consulted with outside of strategic my company, to, to, you know, to take a look at their time management, I let me put it this way, you've heard the expression, when you're already looking at something else in a different career, you got one foot still working in the career, you already have one foot out the door, you've already engaged in the process, I think people are afraid to engage in the process of changing because they just not sure what it is, they would change to. So what I've done in the past, and what I advise anybody to do is you know, take a little bit of time it's take baby steps, and just start researching things that you've thought about, that you really like to do, but you're not willing to, you know, pull the rug out from yourself, to go onto something different, you want to be able to start to research and kind of look, and what's going to happen naturally, if you give it a small amount of time to begin with, you're going to take more and more time to research, you're going to get excited. And then you're gonna start formulating this plan and in your brain about how you could possibly do it. And if you feel like you can't like it's beyond your paygrade that's when you ask for help if you truly want to move and make that change. But the important part is looking and researching no different than that math teacher. You would have been still working today. Well, maybe not. She's probably in her 80s. But the bottom line is she she would still be arguing Well, I don't know. And I can tell you, by the way in that story that the husband, he couldn't fight laughing out loud. When when she when he found out all this stuff. Because he has been working her for the longest time to three years, just retire. We have so many things we could do just retire, you can take a big portion of the time you've you've you were spending teaching, doing the mentoring and the rest of this stuff that we would like to do together to reconnect and and in partial retirement. That's the beauty when you make a change. And I would encourage anybody regardless of your age, to start looking into that because a lot of people are in careers, that they really don't have the passion and ability to want to grow into as opposed to something they've thought about in the past but just did the circumstances as they see it. We're not there for them to make a change.
Ray Loewe 18:45
Yeah, you know, I was thinking I need to add one really critical element to that. Mike lives in northern Indiana just south of Chicago. Okay. Life Mike is broadcasting this morning from Maui.
Mike Jankowske 19:03
No, no, no, Oahu, Oahu
Ray Loewe 19:04
Oh, you're on Oahu, see you changed islands again on me, but
Mike Jankowske 19:10
I did not change islands. You know, as you get older Ray, well, we're not going to finish that sentence.
Okay, bottom line, okay. So basically, I'm going to say something here that's going to make everybody laugh on this call. And sarcasm is going to ooze out of every listeners pores when I say this, I'm stuck here. Stuck in Hawaii, because I was supposed to fly back April 22. And we're probably going to fly back given a vaccine March 28. Now, that's the stuck itis but it gives the opportunity and no excuse for me to be distracted as much and actually focus in a more of things I'd love doing. like doing a podcast like this. Telling Ray doesn't remember where I'm in Hawaii.
Ray Loewe 20:02
All right, with that comment, we have to end this podcast. But we got to do another one of these. You know, I think that our listeners can see why you're the lucky one of the luckiest people in the world. There's no question here. And you've been able to take a career and channel with the way you want, you're able to figure out how to change your venue, you're in Hawaii, you know, where the rest of us are struggling with wind and cold and misery. You know, you're, you're happy guy, I think. And when I go back and re listen to this podcast, you know, I have a list here of the number of the traits and mindsets that the luckiest people in the world have. I think you've hit every one of them. Okay.
Mike Jankowske 20:44
Well, let me just end this with the comment that you know, I live in a town called Valparaiso, Indiana. we affectionately call that town Valpo. Rain, snow windy ana because they can do that all in the same day in no certain order. By design, we wanted to escape Valpo rain snow, windyana. for our own Good during the winter moms because of that. Lake Michigan lake effect. Oh, yeah. So I just wanted to add to that, and you know, folks, my only state, it was great doing this. I all I can suggest here is everybody can get themselves juiced up, to be able to do the research and innovate. And if you need help get help, because it is a wonderful experience, where you know it. I wish everybody could experience what I've been through and continue to go through. And everybody has that opportunity.
KC Dempster 21:37
That's exactly right.
Ray Loewe 21:39
All right. We don't have anything more to say.
KC Dempster 21:41
No, I think it was Mike said at all.
Ray Loewe 21:43
Yeah. So thanks, Mike and KC, where are we going next?
KC Dempster 21:47
Well, we're we're approaching the holidays. So we may have a very special couple of podcasts coming up on the holidays but lips are sealed Ray don't give it away. Just Can I just say that they
Ray Loewe 21:59
want everybody wants to be here. Okay, it's very non traditional over what we've done, but it's going to be exciting and and more important amusing.
KC Dempster 22:08
Stop yourself
Ray Loewe 22:08
maybe not quite as amusing as Mike and Mike. Have a great day. everybody. Have a great day. Have a great couple weeks and we will see you soon.
Diane Dayton 22:19
Thank you for listening to Changing the Rules, a podcast designed to help you and your life the way you want and give you what you need to make it happen. Join us in two weeks for our next exciting topics on Changing the Rules with KC Dempster and Ray Loewe the luckiest guy in the world.